Triple murderer's execution stayed until Monday

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By Rhonda Cook and Bill Rankin

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Capital punishment opponents and attorneys for a man scheduled to die next week are pushing their arguments that he is not competent to be executed by distributing photos of the gashes Brandon Rhode cut in his own neck and arms just hours before he was initially set to be put to death.

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AP Photo/Georgia Department of Corrections Death row inmate Brandon Rhode, in a photo released by the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Inmate used razor in suicide try

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"Executing Rhode on the heels of his attempted suicide is especially cruel and inhuman,” Laura Moye, director of the Death Penalty Abolition Campaign, said in a written statement Friday. “To strap Rhode’s stitched up body to a gurney, fresh with razor cuts to his wrists and neck, is particularly grizzly. He may not be innocent, but he is a human being and what is done to him speaks volumes about our society's values.

"Georgia officials may find it inconvenient that Rhode tried to kill himself before they could, but questions about his current competency to face the ultimate punishment must be properly addressed,” Moye said.

Just before 4:30 p.m. Friday, little more than 2 ½ hours before he was to be executed, the Georgia Supreme Court issued a temporary stay until 4 p.m. Monday. The Department of Corrections scheduled it for 7 p.m. Monday, three hours after the current stay expires.

The court did not explain the 6-1 decision but it came as Rhode’s lawyers are arguing that his suicide attempt was evidence he is not competent to be executed. The courts have ruled it is unconstitutional to execute someone who does not understand that they are being punished and why.

Rhode and a co-defendant were sentenced to die for murdering 37-year-old Steven Moss, and his 11-year-old son, Bryan, and 15-year-old daughter, Kristin, in 1998.

Rhode, then 18 years old, and Daniel Lucas, also on death row, were ransacking the Moss home in Jones County, near Macon, when Bryan came home and confronted the two men armed with a baseball bat.

They shot the boy.

They killed his sister moments later when she came home. Steven Moss was their third victim.

A warrant calling for Rhode’s execution said the lethal injection should be carried out between noon Sept. 21 and noon Sept. 28.

It was initially scheduled for 7 p.m. on Tuesday, the first day possible. The Georgia Supreme Court stayed it after Rhode’s tried to kill himself earlier that day.

The execution was reset for Friday at 9 a.m. but on Thursday the Department of Corrections commissioner pushed back the time to 7 p.m. to allow more time for the courts to resolve multiple pending challenges.

Now Rhode's execution is set for 4 p.m. Monday, just 20 hours before the “window” closes. If he is not executed by noon on Tuesday, a judge will have to sign a new warrant for a new execution date several weeks off.

Rhode’s lawyer wrote in a court filing that the 31-year-old murderer was brought from “the brink of death” only so the state could execute. In court filings, attorney Brian Kammer described the “ironic circumstances” that began when Rhode cut himself. His lawyer contends a prison guard gave Rhode razors, one of three taboo items for an inmate hours from execution.

Rhode was revived at the hospital in nearby Griffin.His self-inflicted wounds were sutured and he was returned to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, where he has been kept restrained since the suicide attempt.

Rhode’s lawyer and death penalty opponents have circulated photographs of the sutured wounds along with an artist’s rendering of Rhode strapped in a “restraint chair” that his lawyer described as a "torture chair" with tight straps.

“The stress and barbarity of his present situation, coupled with his longstanding depression and mental illness, has resulted in Brandon Rhode now experiencing dissociative episodes as his mind tries unsuccessfully to cope with his current physical condition,” Kammer wrote.

An appeal on another issue in the planned execution was pending in the federal Court of Appeals in Atlanta but Rhode’s lawyer withdrew it on Friday. The U.S. Supreme Court still has another appeal filed by Rhode, that he should not be executed because he suffered organic brain damage because his teenage mother drank during the first five months of her pregnancy.